small talk

An HBO special in which Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK discuss the craft of stand-up comedy. They talk about writing jokes, technique and how they handle old material.

A short IBM behind-the-scenes documentary on how researchers moved individual atoms to make the world's smallest movie. It introduces the scientists and their work on atomic memory and data storage.

Ed March rides a Honda C90 through Iran on his journey from Malaysia to the UK, showing the country and its people. He argues Iran is far more welcoming than the press suggests.

Kirsten Dirksen visits architect Gary Chang's 32 square meter Hong Kong apartment, which he has redesigned over decades. Sliding walls and transformable furniture turn it into 24 different room configurations.

A tour of Christian Schallert's 24 square meter apartment in Barcelona, designed so that it looks like an empty cube until he builds the furniture he needs. Kirsten Dirksen shows how the space is transformed for cooking, sleeping and dressing.

A 1987 episode of The Computer Chronicles on Apple's HyperCard, showing users building their own applications. Gary Kildall appears and Bill Atkinson discusses the program, with credit given to earlier influences.

Hyperland is a 1990 BBC documentary written by and starring Douglas Adams, who tours an imagined future of hypertext and software agents. It features Ted Nelson among others.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.

A 1982 Bell Labs film hosted by Victor Vyssotsky on the origins and design philosophy of the UNIX operating system, with appearances by Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie. It shows pipes, filters and a shell one-liner spell checker being built.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

A 2017 documentary filmed at the Santa Fe Institute in which novelist Cormac McCarthy talks with SFI's David Krakauer. They discuss isolation, mathematics, character and the nature of the unconscious.

Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.

A 45-minute Flex Your Rights documentary on how to deal with police in three situations: traffic stops, encounters at home, and on the street. It presents practical advice on asserting constitutional rights and refusing searches.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

An excerpt from the documentary Mountain Talk on Appalachian English. Residents of Southern Appalachia talk about their dialect and give examples of its distinctive words.

A short film about the Dervaes family, who grow over 6,000 pounds of food a year on a tenth of an acre near downtown Los Angeles. They grow more than 400 plant species, keep chickens and ducks, and get most of their food from the plot.